


memento mori

by darkbackoftime



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2016-08-25
Packaged: 2018-08-11 00:20:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7867603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkbackoftime/pseuds/darkbackoftime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Often, you think there is something in the stillness of a photograph that promises an eternity unchanging but is more nearly a loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	memento mori

As she crosses the square, Edie digs her hands deep into the pockets of her coat, shoulders drawn up against the evening cold. You imagine the loose threads of the seam unravelling beneath her fingers -- something to hold onto. At the steps to the Underground she hesitates, stands for a moment framed against the crowd.

She does not look back.

You watch until she is no more than a blur of red wool out the corner of your eye, not quite the same hue as your old darkroom safe-light or the burnt ember of your painted mouth -- closer instead to the fresh blood that blooms against the white of your handkerchief when you cough. When finally you move away from the window, you catch your reflection in the glass. You are hollow and ghostly, almost as pale, you think, as the Gardenias arranged in a vase by the door. Already wilting beneath the hospital's fluorescent lights, they remind you of what you have lost and, inevitably, of your own mortality.

Later, and alone again in the still unquiet between waking and sleeping, you remember you grandparents' albumen prints. You recall summer afternoons under the Rowan tree; imagine yourself a child again, cocooned in white lace and lawn cotton. While you got lost between the pages of a book (and in getting lost, discovered yourself), your mother sat with the album open in her lap. She regarded each face with the same quiet devotion. It reminded you of how the religious contemplate their beads and scripture.

Sometimes, curious, you reached out to trace the lineaments of a man's face with unsteady fingers. You remember a portrait of your grandfather, full-bearded and weary beneath an unforgiving sky. Facing him on the page, a boy in long grass eyes screwed shut against the powder-flash. He carried a pair of shoes in his hand. Your mother called him Yoska. She pronounced the name with careful emphasis but, whenever you asked what had become of him afterwards, she'd fall silent, retreat into a brown study and shut the door behind her with a gentle sigh.

You turned the page -- kept turning until you reached the end and yesterday's servants formed a line on the front steps, hands clasped over their tokens grimly. The gardener wore whiskers and in the picture holds a watering-can. The cook -- broad-faced, stoop-shouldered -- cradles a bowl against her apron. Dustpan and flatiron, bridle and bit -- they tell you everything and, all at once, so much less than each individual might have said about himself, had there been opportunity. You resolved then that you'd let your subjects choose how to stand and where.

Today you wonder idly, if, as they arranged themselves for the photographer, they sensed that they were leaving a piece of themselves behind which, once exposed on collodion glass, could never be recovered. Often, you think there is something in the stillness of a photograph that promises an eternity unchanging but is more nearly a loss.

When you first took up your camera, you looked on and admired the sleight of hand that transformed the most mundane object into a source of enduring fascination. You felt that you were giving something back to the dispossessed or perhaps adding something which otherwise was beyond their reach. At the very least, you believed, it would help you to make sense of the world. Conventional wisdom holds that an enormity is best understood if reduced to its constituent parts and so, you had thought, why not view life according to the smallest accretions (and diminutions) of time?

In after years, you found this a peculiar kind of irony. You dreamt instead -- endlessly, deliriously -- and woke wanting almost to weep.

Always, it was the same.

_Scene: a small studio like your own with sloping windows, a brass bell over the door and dog-violets in a jar on the desk. In the corner, the gramophone plays Beiderbecke and the Wolverines._

_The woman sits backlit against a velvet curtain, looks into the camera and beyond it (at you, the photographer, or to the future). The face you imagine for her at first is unremarkable. But when she says something – inconsequential, a courtesy -- with a smile in her voice and you catch her eyes, they are full of mirth and inarticulate longing._

_Suddenly, sick-feeling, you realise that they are Edie's eyes._

_She looks at you expectantly, this woman you love and, helpless, you lower your head to the viewfinder. The shutter of the Sanderson clicks and closes. The bulb flashes, extinguishes the darkness for a moment; is gone. Time stretches between the hands on the Ormolu clock. If it were not for the violent rhythm of your heart, you would swear it had stopped altogether._

_The calm that follows is a reprieve, and too brief. The clock starts again, passes on. The woman sweeps an elegant hand though her hair and stands. Sometimes, her gaze is sorrowful; other times, which is worse, it is simply vacant. She departs in a flurry of fur, her features half-obscured by the black-lace of her veil._

_Afterwards, you watch the prints bleed in the tray-- great clots of silver-salt. They drip as they hang on the line, sounding a requiem out of time. Despair rumbles darkly in your veins and you long all at once to disappear, to fade from living into being and from thence to something less than being_.

Because of this -- your perpetual nightmare -- you washed your hands each day before you left, scrubbed them raw with soap in a Belfast sink. As the water spilled out into the cracked bowl, you'd hear your father's voice again reciting Psalms. Sonorously, he intoned: 'Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, cleanse me from my sin.'

You know now that you were not wrong to seek absolution. There was a death, you have discovered, so nearly past caring. It is not the death you imagined in your dream. Nor is it the one you had almost wanted that day in the darkroom years past (and already too late). If that had been an ending bitter and aching, it had also been an absurd pretence.

Watching Edie's features come into focus in the soak-bath, as you developed the last print, you had felt her dissolve a little further in your mind. And because you had no wish to replace your lived reality with the clarity of petrified light, no matter how imperfectly your memory recalled it, or how painfully, you determined to rid yourself of the photograph; send it away. Another more selfish bit of you, you acknowledge, entertained the idea that, confronted by her own image, Edie might be induced to forget herself. Angry and hurting more than you had thought yourself capable, you had wanted her to feel as lost as you did.

The death, Edie described to you only hours ago, as she perched on the edge of your hospital bed, was different; cold and lonely and final. They dragged a body from the river, cast adrift in the current --Thomas, her husband. His pockets weighted down with stones, he was more despairing even than you.

Thinking about it now, you realise with an odd sort of terror that you do not know after all whether it was better that way -- a kindness as you had imagined to yourself in moments of weakness that it would be. You had not wanted his death precisely but, had thought, it would have made everything simpler. You apprehended in yourself a flicker of jealousy that, had the circumstances been right, might have made it easy enough to privilege your own humanity over his. Even as you sealed the photograph in its envelope that day, you had half-wished for him to find it at its destination; to read the words you had written unthinkingly on the back and know that he had been betrayed.

('For always,' you had scribbled from habit. You laughed, when you noticed. Quietly, because there was a small part of you that thought desperately that this was not -- could not be -- an untruth.)

You have made so many mistakes and thought of them only as foolishness to be forgiven and, eventually, forgotten. But, in the end you find that you are not so indifferent. And as you breathe each shuddering breath out against the sheets, uncertain if it will be your last, you are infinitely glad of small mercies.

You had washed your hands before you left.

Half-mad and suddenly afraid, you convince yourself that somehow this makes your guilt that much less.


End file.
